Good Practice in Transcultural Counselling: An Asian Perspective

In Britain today, counsellors and therapists often work with people from a diverse range of ethnic groups whose cultures are substantially different from their own. There is increasing concern that people from black and ethnic communities have limited access to appropriate services—despite service planners' and providers' statements that mental health services are being restructured to become more sensitive, relevant and meaningful to these communities. This paper is an attempt to redress the balance with an emphasis on the therapeutic needs of South Asian communities. It aims to challenge assumptions and beliefs held by therapists and counsellors, question therapeutic practice based within a white, middle-class ideology, raise awareness of an 'Asian' perspective in therapy, and provide some guidelines for good practice in transcultural counselling.     

God's Beauty‐in‐Act: An Artful Renewal of Human Imagining

This article seeks to contribute to the ongoing renaissance in theological discourse that strives to heed Karl Barth's call to stop perpetuating the gap in our knowledge of God by integrating beauty into our theological discourse. In this way, God's beauty, understood as the fittingness of the incarnate Son's actions in the Spirit to the Father's will that radiates the splendor of God's triune love to the world, is seen to renew human imagining, which is essential not only of human being but also for creative expression and ethical action.     

Missional Congregations in Civil Society: An Imagination for God's World

This article provides glimpses of the emerging missional church within the civil society arena from the perspective of congregational case studies. Civil society studies offer five potential community contributions that provide congregations expanded possibilities for discerning and fulfilling their missional vocations in their communities. Framed within trinitarian missional theology, these create a meaningful framework for congregations to expand their imaginations and strengthen their public participation with God's mission in today's world.     

Serving God's Mission Together in Christ's Way: Reflections on the Way to Edinburgh 2010

This paper argues that missio Dei theology must continue to provide the basis for an ecumenical missiology, provided certain problems are revisited, in line with themes of the 2010 Edinburgh study process. Among them is the need for emphasizing the vertical dimension of a transformative spirituality, somehow neglected in earlier ecumenical theologies. Only this will prevent an over‐estimation of humanity's capacities. Within a missio Dei theology the specific role of the church is to be reaffirmed: there is no way back behind integration, which remains a cornerstone of an ecumenical approach, provided it keeps a critical distance to dogmatic ecclesiologies that tend to hinder progress towards visible unity. The debate on gospel and culture has to be urgently taken up again, through a positive appreciation of syncretism and the related search for criteria in intercultural hermeneutics. This will lead to articulating pneumatological approaches to mission with Christologies. Indeed, the New Testament texts with the most universal horizon refer to Christ as Word or Wisdom and not to the Holy Spirit. The paper moves on to ask whether then the relevance of the biblical wisdom tradition should not feature more in missiology. It could provide fertile approaches to witness in a religiously plural and ecologically damaged world. Ecumenical mission should in future be shaped by wisdom as much as it has been by prophecy, and keep both traditions in creative tension.     

The Role of Short‐Term Mission Teams in the New Centers of Global Christianity

Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected in El Salvador and South Africa over a four‐year period, this article uses a social constructionist approach to describe two types of interaction between short‐term mission teams and their hosts. First, hosts encounter the flow of teams as foreign social products. Once they internalize this new part of their social reality, hosts seek to recruit and control teams. They also mimic the practice of short‐term missions, sending their own teams to remote locations. Second, hosts interact directly with visitors, engaging in world‐building activities that create transnational religious ties. Short‐term missions thus make residents of the new centers of Christianity more mobile in Christianity's global civil society and increase the number of ties between Christians across borders. These findings have implications for the scholarly debate about how to conceptualize Global Christianity; they also broaden the scope of the emerging discourse on short‐term missions.     

God's Mission and the Christian Assembly: The Search for an Alternative Practice of Worship

Abstract : The search for something alternative characterizes the practice of worship in many contemporary Christian assemblies. Although “alternative” is often set in opposition to “traditional,” it is better understood in response to “conventional” worship. Five such alternative movements are described here: liturgical movement, contemporary worship movement, liberation perspectives, Pentecostalism, and postmodern approaches. The alternative impulse in all of these perspectives has to do with a fuller realization of the Christian assembly in relation to God's mission.     

Living in Ambiguity: Mission Formation as Living among Counter‐communities

This article has been developed from a short response given to Prof Néstor Míguez's paper, “Mission Formation for Transforming Discipleship” (featured in this issue of IRM) at the Commission for World Mission and Evangelism's Consultation on Mission Formation, held in Matanzas, Cuba, from 10 to 15 September 2016. The article sets out to explore Míguez's concept of living in ambiguity as a call to mission formation to create transformative counter‐communities, which can equip people to live with the struggle of justice promised and justice denied. The paper explores this through a number of lenses. The letter of Jeremiah to the exiles in Jeremiah 29 offers a biblical context for creating communities which are counter to dominant and imperial values. The work of French philosopher Michel Foucault on heterotopias offers a philosophical framework for such communities.     

God's Attributes as God's Clarities: Wolf Krötke's Doctrine of the Divine Attributes

Abstract: For the Berlin systematic theologian Wolf Krötke, the doctrine of the divine attributes presents God as, first, one who is clear and luminous in himself, and, second, as one who communicates his clarity in the eventfulness of Jesus Christ. Krötke modifies the traditional approach to the doctrine by redescribing God's attributes in terms of clarities which, in turn, are indicative of the glory of God. In this article, I expound and analyse Krötke's understanding of the clarities of truth, love, power and eternity as proper to God in his relationally rich reality shining forth, with an eye to the character of the renewal of human life thereby effected. Critical comments are also raised in relation to Krötke's proposal, particularly with respect to his lack of a robust doctrine of the immanent Trinity and the necessity of maintaining such.     

从差会到教会:诚静怡基督教本色化思想解析

诚静怡(1881-1939)是中国近代一位享誉海内外的教会领袖。他很早就提出中国教会处于“过渡阶段”的论断,极力提倡建设本色的“中国教会”,并从中国基督教的实际出发,设计了从“差会”到“中国教会”的过渡模式,主张差会逐渐向中国教会移交财产和治权,中国教会也能逐渐承担起全部责任,通过渐进而非激进的变革,来实现真正的中国基督教。本文尝试对诚静怡教会本色化思想的来源和特征做一分析。     

God's Action in the World: The Relevance of Quantum Mechanics

It has been suggested that God can act on the world by operating within the limits set by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (HUP) without violating the laws of nature. This requires nature to be intrinsically indeterministic. However, according to the statistical interpretation the quantum mechanical wavefunction represents the average behavior of an ensemble of similar systems and not that of a single system. The HUP thus refers to a relation between the spreads of possible values of position and momentum and so is consistent with a fully deterministic world. This statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics is supported by reference to actual measurements, resolves the quantum paradoxes, and stimulates further research. If this interpretation is accepted, quantum mechanics is irrelevant to the question of God's action in the world.     

Parental Suicide: An Organizing Event in the Development of Latency Age Children

ABSTRACT: This paper proposes that children who are especially vulnerable to parental suicide have not resolved earlier developmental issues of separation-individuation. Five children, ages 6 to 12, were studied intensively. Parental suicide during the child's latency age period has profound influences on children's ego development and character formation because during this time childhood ego functioning is rapidly maturing and superego functions are developing. The trauma of parental suicide is heightened when difficulties for the surviving parent in mourning interfere with open discussion between the parent and child about the death. Parental suicide may stimulate childhood suicidal impulses if the child identifies with and idealizes the dead parent and has wishes of reuniting with the deceased.     

Engaging God's Mission and Diakonia in Life of Public Spheres: Justification and Economic Justice

Abstract : This article approaches the theology of mission from the point of view of God's mission and diakonia, seeking a missional model of the grace of justification and economic justice in an age of World Christianity. The author engages a hermeneutical‐prophetic side of evangelization—viva vox evangelii—in the public sphere, and demonstrates the intrinsic connection between missio and diakonia Dei in Jesus Christ using a trinitarian‐hermeneutical perspective. The article shows that evangelization as God's mission occupies a central place by taking into account challenges from the postcolonial emancipation in the context of Empire.